[tdwg-content] Proposed new Darwin Core environmental terms from ENVO

[John Wieczorek]

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Steve Baskauf
<steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> The other thing I'm wondering about the values of dwc:biome would be how a
> user would indicate the controlled vocabulary one is using.  The ENVO
> ontology is mentioned.  Under the scenario of the draft RDF guide, the term
> dwcuri:biome would have a URI value of
> <http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ENVO_01000195>.  That would be unambiguous.
> However, if dwc:biome is reserved for literal values (as the RDF guide
> suggests it should be) then how does a machine know that "flooded grassland
> biome" is a label from ENVO and not a literal description of a biome from
> the Whittaker, Walter, Bailey, etc. systems which are probably currently in
> much wider use than ENVO and therefore likely controlled vocabularies of
> choice for many users?

A machine will have no way to know from which vocabulary a value for a
property comes unless the value says so. That is common to all terms
that recommend a controlled vocabulary, but do not enforce it. It
would be no different for dwc:biome. The only way to be unambiguous is
to provide an unambiguous value, which, as you noted,
http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ENVO_01000195 is.